


Only If For A Night

by henriettahoney



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: ((again)), (but not really), Dead Noah Czerny, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Pynch Week 2019, Ronan Lynch Has Feelings, Sleeping in a barn, The Barns (Raven Cycle)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 07:50:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20850014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henriettahoney/pseuds/henriettahoney
Summary: He’s quiet until he can hear outside his own head again—until he can focus on the ticking of the grandfather clock on the cedar chest across the room and the bellow of the bullfrogs searching out the pond beyond the fields and the crisp click of Adam swallowing down panic and making room for relief inside his stomach.When he feels like maybe he’s a person again, like maybe he’s real and here and existing, he says, “He’s really fucking gone.”





	Only If For A Night

“Shhh, shh,” Adam soothes, pressing his lips to Ronan’s hairline and the corner of his mouth and the smooth plane between the soft flare of his nostril and the apple of his cheek. “I’ve got you, my baby. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

The duvet is a snow-capped mountain, flipped half on its grey underbelly, half on its white top, constricting Ronan’s legs like a vice, and he cannot climb down. He clings to Adam’s shirt, skin on cotton on skin, and begs his lungs to cooperate—begs his brain to remember what they’re supposed to be cooperating with. 

When his eyes are open, he sees his bedroom in the Barns—his and Adam’s—pale moonlight casting enough illumination through the bare windowpane to soften the edges of the night and all its horrors. When they’re closed, he sees blood. Rivulets, sprays, droplets, spatters, pools—all originating from a respective love of his life. Adam. Matthew. Gansey. Blue. Declan.

Noah. 

_ Noah.  _

He shudders and Adam’s arms draw him impossibly nearer, casting away the unfathomable pressure of the air beyond them. 

“You don’t have to tell me,” Adam says, so cautious, like maybe Ronan is a buck that he’ll spook if he’s too loud. Maybe he is. “But you can, you know, if you want to. If you need to.”

Ronan is quiet until his heartbeat sounds less like a cataclysm to the internal tunnels of his ears. He’s quiet until he’s matching Adam breath for breath, hands to chests, foreheads pressed together in support and solidarity. He’s quiet until he can hear outside his own head again—until he can focus on the ticking of the grandfather clock on the cedar chest across the room and the bellow of the bullfrogs searching out the pond beyond the fields and the crisp  _ click _ of Adam swallowing down panic and making room for relief inside his stomach. 

When he feels like maybe he’s a person again, like maybe he’s real and here and existing, he says, “He’s really fucking gone.”

Adam’s being pauses, like a stutter; like he’s loading. Then his fingers are working over Ronan’s scalp, nails fighting the battle of pacifists against the short, coarse hairs he’s been meaning to shave for a week. “Your dad?”

A noise like a laugh or a choke or a hysterical sob claws its way up Ronan’s throat and out of his mouth in a wet huff. He feels something akin to guilt creeping up his spine in response to the fact that his father—or his mother, for that matter—wasn’t a subject of this dream. “Noah,” is all he says. 

Adam stills again, but not in a  _ frozen _ way this time, and then: “Come on. Get up.”

* * *

Neither of them thought to dress warmly enough for the cemetery at midnight, but Ronan doesn’t mind. The mid-October chill is a clear, tangible reminder of how actively present he is, and something about the way he’s softened and grown over the years appreciates the sensation more than his teenage self would ever have had the capacity to. 

Noah’s grave is newly decorated with mums and fern leaves, which means, Ronan knows, that his family has been here since their last visit. If Gansey and Blue had come, they’d have alerted Adam and Ronan to their presence in town. 

“I know it’s just a hole with a body in it,” Adam intones, echoing Ronan’s frequent sentiment, pulling him from his musings, “but it’s what we’ve got, so I just thought maybe it would—maybe you’d like to be here for a little while.”

Ronan doesn’t respond, because he isn’t expected to. Instead, he sits down directly on the grave, facing the headstone, and Adam has the good grace not to reprimand him for it. Wordlessly, he jams his hand into the pocket of his dark jeans and retrieves a sleek, metal object, placing it unceremoniously on the damp earth before him. 

“Did you dream that?” Adam asks, toeing the dirt next to the newly erected model Mustang. 

“Yeah,” Ronan says, offering no further explanation. 

They linger in silence for some time, Ronan sitting and Adam standing beside him, his thigh a support for Ronan’s head. 

The night is open to them, offering peace to its dreamer and energy to its magician, and all at once Ronan is having an impossible time imagining confining himself to the likes of four walls so insulated that the breeze can’t reach him. 

He doesn’t mention this, but he must seem particularly cagey, because as soon as they return home, Adam kisses him on the porch and then instructs him to stay put, disappearing into the house and resurfacing a moment later with his arms so full of bedding provisions Ronan has to rip half of them away for fear he’ll trip down the steps trying to see over them. 

They decide to sleep in the nearest barn, atop a haphazard, makeshift palette of pillows of various lengths and blankets in various stages of the folding process, and Adam covers him with two quilts—both handmade by Aurora—before crawling in next to him, seeking out any exposed skin for additional warmth. 

Ronan doesn’t allow himself this degree of whimsy in the daylight, but here, tonight, something in the atmosphere is as shimmering and uncertain as he is, and he finds himself uttering, “Do you think he’s still around somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Adam admits, because being married to Ronan Lynch will knock the lying streak out of anyone, even if it’s only ever been for the good of the person on the receiving end. The cacophony of crickets almost overpowers him, and Ronan has to turn his head to hear when Adam continues. “I’d like to say yes, but that’s sad in a way, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want him watching us miss him all the time. So I guess I hope not.”

Ronan nods his head, because that’s as solid an answer as any, and tilts Adam’s chin up to kiss him again. 

* * *

When Ronan wakes, the sun’s rays are filtering in through the slats of the barn, golden and filmy and gleaming. 

Half-conscious, eyes heavy-lidded, he pulls Adam—still sleeping—closer, and allows himself the briefest notion that when the light catches the specks of dust drifting off the plumes rising from the hay of the barn’s floor, it  _ almost  _ looks like glitter. 

**Author's Note:**

> Here's another thing I wrote that technically fills a pynch week prompt but isn't actually for pynch week since I, you know, didn't do it and all.
> 
> Thank you so, so much for reading! <3
> 
> (Title is stolen from a Florence and the Machine song.)


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